Was Mortal Engines a Misunderstood Masterpiece?
Mortal Engines. Image courtesy of Universal Pictures.
Mortal Engines, from WingNut films and Peter Jackson, was released in 2018. It was a box office bomb and a critical failure. There can be no doubt of that. I didn’t go see it when it was in theaters. But when I finally sat down to watch it recently, I found myself quite in awe and wondering if perhaps Mortal Engines wasn’t a deeply misunderstood masterpiece? I’ll save you the suspense - it is not. But it is a movie with great ideas done badly, and that is very nearly the same thing.
Mortal Engines is based on a popular book, and Peter Jackson had been trying to develop it for many years after securing the rights in 2009. But it’s a hard property to develop, for reasons which I shall now explain. The story is set in a post-apocalyptic Earth where giant mobile cities drive around devouring each other. The aesthetic is very much in the Howl’s Moving Castle steam-punk wheelhouse. And it is a big, wild world. There are undead cyborgs, floating cities, sky pirates, and a giant impenetrable magic wall of some kind. This is great, because it provides a deep and wide foundation to build an engrossing, interesting fantasy world for your film to play around in.
But it also creates a very real practical problem, from a filmmaking perspective. You only have about 2 hours in a motion picture. And there is a lot of back-story and context that needs to be communicated, and there are a lot of very important decisions about what will be excluded, what will be kept and most important of all how the crucial information that is kept is going to be communicated to the audience. A film like Aquaman, another epic world-building fail, chose to just dump exposition on the audience in the clumsiest manner possible.
A lot of films do. Why? Because it’s the path of least resistance, and if you are under a lot of pressure to make a $200 million tent pole that looks like every other $200 million tent pole you will probably end up trying to hang your hat on an orgy of meaningless CGI at the end to save you from lazy writing. This never works, but writers seem to all take solace in failing in the same way so there is that. Anyway, the rise of big-budget serialized television like Game of Thrones is a good antidote to the problem of time when it comes to fantasy world-building, and there is no doubt that Mortal Engines should have been a series. But it was, in the end, a movie so we will meet it on those terms.
The initial world-building is actually very good. It’s fantasy shlock, of course, so the fact that it doens’t make any sense whatsoever can be thrown to the side and we simply suspend our disbelief and accept that in this world, giant cities rumble around chasing one another. We can even overlook the splendid idiocy of a term like “municipal Darwinism” because that is not really what these fantasy stories are about. They are escapism and they are meant to be fun and silly and create an alternate reality that will be fun to hang around in for two hours.
And initially, it delivers on that promise. The idea of a historian of ancient Earth going through our debris in the future and trying to puzzle out what it is has loads of potential - the exhibit on The Screen Age was great. And then the world starts to open up and expand outward, and you see there is a lot of potential there too. Even the undead cyborg character, who for some unfathomable reason narrates the opening, that is a character that could have worked. It’s interesting, and it hints at a vast untold backstory related to its creation.
But that’s where Mortal Engines falls apart. It takes good ideas, and then it does them badly. The cyborg is not animated well (oddly, he looks best when he is fully illuminated which is usually the opposite with CGI characters), and he just goes around shouting someone’s name in a gurggle for about 30 minutes before he passes from the film in a moment that is meant to be emotional but falls flat because it has done nothing to earn its stripes. It reflects the fundmantal problem with Mortal Engines - the movie is over-stuffed, and moves too quickly. It’s ambitious to a fault, unfortunately.
It reminded me very much of the Wachowski’s Jupiter Ascending. It is wildly ambitious and many bad creative choices were made along the way. But that’s OK! We need films like these that dare to fail in spectacular ways, to bite off more than they can chew and try to build intricate worlds. If Mortal Engines would have dropped a couple of its characters and subplots, and focused on the world it was building - which benefits from truly immaculate production design and special effects - it could very well have been a masterpiece. If it had been confident enough to just let the audience soak in this fantastical world, and explore the little nooks and crannies that it hints at but uses mainly as farferetic window dressing, it could have been great.
Unfortunately, it went full throttle on nonsense plot, thin characters, and too much stuff. Everything and the kitchen sink, etc. Nevertheless, I applaud the making of a misguided misfire like Mortal Engines. The production of a big film like this still creates hundreds or thousands of well-paying jobs - if it fails to make its money back, the only ones who really lose anything are the investors, assholes like Steve Mnuchin and Saudi sovereign wealth funds. In the process it creates jobs and we are left with an oddly beautiful piece of crap like Mortal Engines that tried to do way too much and almost succeeded it.
